Backup and recovery are two significant issues facing Information Technology (“IT”) administrators. Whether from physical failure, human error, or a system crash, data loss is inevitable without an appropriate backup and recovery solution. IT administrators may examine their recovery point objectives (“RPO”) and recovery time objectives (“RTO”) when considering a proper backup and recovery solution. An IT organization may have a system that allows some data loss and only requires a backup once every day. Another system may require every change to be backed up, allowing data to be recovered from any point in time. Some non-critical systems may allow several days to recover after a failure; however, other critical systems, requiring high-availability, may require immediate failover.
Some IT organizations use physical machines for backup and recovery. A physical recovery point may need to be configured with hardware identical to a failed machine to recover data for the failed machine. Other solutions may allow recovery machines and failed machines to have different hardware, which may necessitate modifying data backed up from the failed machine to allow the data to run on the recovery machine.
Systems that need short recovery times may include a substantial amount of hardware redundancy—sometimes up to twice the number of physical machines needed for day-to-day operations. The extra machines may contain hot backups that allow a failed machine to be replaced instantly. In addition to the extra hardware costs, such disaster recovery systems may consume management resources to keep the backup machines and the production machines in sync.
IT administrators are increasingly turning to computer system virtualization to better administer and manage their infrastructures. In some cases, virtualization may reduce overall costs, including those associated with backup and recovery. Some traditional backup and recovery systems may implement virtualization by converting a backup file to a virtual-disk file to allow a virtual machine to be booted from the virtual-disk file. Unfortunately, converting backup files to virtual-disk files may consume additional data storage and may involve substantial input/output (“I/O”) and processing.